Now that we’re a full week past the initial high-speed rail announcement, we’ve taken the time to resurvey some of the elements of this massive investment. Demand is one of those elements and it’s critical to projecting ridership.
If you think lending his name to a fallacy is Pete Wehner's only contribution to public life, you're oh so mistaken.
It's a modern-day eco-horror story: Asian carp are slowly creeping up the Mississippi, en route to Lake Michigan, slipping through various barriers that humans have put in place. Once they reach the Great Lakes, the effects could be horrendous—the carp have a tendency to gobble up everything in sight and could overrun the place, crowding out trout and other native species. Oh, and plus the massive carp have a nasty habit of leaping eight feet up in the air when startled, smashing their 100-pound bodies into the unsuspecting faces of fisherman and water-skiers.
To create the new jobs needed in our nation, and make sure our world-leading creativity and innovation ends up creating new businesses, we need deeper pools of venture and early stage capital.
Nowhere are jobs needed more than in the Midwest manufacturing belt. A recent Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program report authored by Cleveland’s Frank Samuel suggests how we might better link new technology discovery going on in the ‘Rust Belt” to new firm creation. It turns out the industrial heartland reaching from Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and St. Louis in the west to Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Buffalo in the east produces on metrics associated with innovation: 33 percent of all national R&D, 35 percent of all nationally competitive National Institute of Health (NIH) grants; 30 percent of all U.S. patents awarded; and educating 36 percent of all U.S. scientists and engineers.
However only 12 percent of the nation’s venture capital gets invested in the region to convert technology discovery to new firms and jobs Even more disturbingly, the Rust Belt’s deep pockets in terms of sizable state and local pension funds that do put money into VC, are essentially sending it to the coasts. Fully 47 percent of the nation’s public pension fund venture money comes from the Rust Belt--but only 13 percent of that money is reinvested in Great Lakes region commercialization.
This dearth of early stage capital is not just a regional problem--but one of national significance--and a threat to the U.S. position as the world’s innovation engine.
So the White House has finally announced the full list of where that $8 billion in stimulus money for high-speed rail is going. Here are the two big, headline-grabbing projects:
Debates about the costs and benefits of reducing carbon emissions usually get conducted along very narrow lines. First you add up the amount people will have to pay in higher energy bills and then compare that with the benefits of avoiding big temperature increases. Et, voila. Except the problem with this approach is that it ignores many of the indirect benefits (and, yes, indirect costs) of shifting to cleaner forms of energy. And some of those secondary effects might be very significant.
Last week, The New York Times had a great piece about how Asian carp have been making their way up the Mississippi River and are threatening to invade Lake Michigan. If that happens, the Great Lakes would be screwed—the carp would overrun the ecosystem, eat all the food, and devastate the area's $7 billion fishing industry.
The good folks at Grant's Interest Rate Observer must have felt pretty lonely six weeks ago when they suggested the recovery might be "jobful" rather than jobless, as almost everyone was insisting at the time.
Listening to Barack Obama explain his new strategy for Afghanistan tonight, you may have been struck by a sense of deja vu. Before a sea of somber West Point cadets, Obama invoked the grim memory of the September 11 attacks. He vowed that the days of “blank check" policymaking are over. He called al Qaeda a “cancer” that threatens the region and said he would not allow the group a safe haven there. He insisted that the U.S. would get tougher about corruption within the Karzai government and would extend a hand to low-level Taliban fighters willing to switch sides. He pledged to accelerate training of Afghan security forces and explained that doing so will allow our troops to return home.
If these points sounded familiar, it’s because Obama has made them all before. Go back and read the president’s March 27 speech explaining his first troop increase for Afghanistan; tonight’s speech often reads like a lightly rewritten version of that one, this time with 30,000 new troops substituted for 17,000, and new specifics about a date for beginning a U.S. withdrawal (namely, June of 2011).
This is not a complaint about self-plagiarism. It’s a compliment for Obama’s consistency and intellectual honesty. Back in March, Obama described his vision as “a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” That vision implied a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan—one which the Pentagon properly understood to require tens of thousands of more troops to implement. For a time this fall, White House officials fretted that General Stanley McChrystal’s troop request had given them a “sticker shock” which required a re-review of their strategy. But no one who understood the war, no one as smart as Obama, should have been surprised by McChrystal’s troop request.
Which is why it made sense for Obama’s speech tonight to reiterate his March vision. Sure, he could have cited declining political support for the war, and the fraud-tainted election of Hamid Karzai, and the still-precarious U.S. economy as reasons for changing his mind. It would have been hard to blame him. But Obama’s reiteration of his main talking points from March indicates that he believed what he was saying at the time and simply hasn’t seen anything dramatic enough in the past six months to change his mind.
No matter what you think of it, the kind of troop increase that President Obama announced tonight is going to be expensive. With an estimated $1 billion dollar price tag for each additional thousand troops deployed, the new strategy will drive costs well above the $130 billion originally budgeted by the administration for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal year 2010, likely requiring a supplemental spending bill to pass sometime early next year. You can expect the fight over that bill to get nasty.
Conservatives would have us believe that they hold a monopoly on common sense. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and many other right-wing rabble-rousers regularly portray themselves as defenders of the good, old-fashioned common sense of average Americans against an out-of-touch liberal elite. A growing cadre of ambitious politicians likewise aims to lead a crusade in the name of “commonsense conservatism.” Glenn Beck has even gone so far as to publish a runaway bestseller that explicitly piggybacks on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to argue against the danger of “out-of-control government” and the forces of organized foolishness that would foist it on the American people.
The unanimity is impressive. But it is also ridiculous. The fact is that the right’s appeal to common sense is nonsense. Unfortunately, though, it is a form of nonsense with deep roots in the American past and a very long history of political potency. Whether it continues to prove effective in the future will depend in no small measure on how cogently the rest of America responds.
A new Washington Post poll of Republicans records the remarkable extent to which today's rank-and-file GOPers can't identify much in the way of any clear-cut Republican leaders.
President Obama is about to badly alienate antiwar Democrats by sending more troops to Afghanistan. So who will lead the charge on their behalf against the new policy? David Obey seems to want the job. The Wisconsin congressman, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee and opposes the troop increase, put forth legislation last week that proposes to finance the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by raising taxes.
The day before President Obama spoke in Madison, Wisconsin, about the pressing need to improve America's teachers, a report was released on the same topic at a conference in Washington's swanky Capitol Hilton. The task force that wrote the report was chaired by Minnesota Governor (and rumored 2012 presidential candidate) Tim Pawlenty and included such education policy heavyweights as New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee. The report's 20 recommendations for improving teacher effectiveness include providing more funding for alternative teacher training and certification routes (like Teach for America), requiring school districts to create teacher evaluations contingent on student achievement, and using those evaluations to help determine teacher salaries and make tenure decisions.
Strikingly, though, the report wasn't endorsed by the full task force. Reasons, according to conference speakers, ranged from a) "there just wasn't time" for all of the members to get their organizations to sign on to the document, to b) it was enough for the full body to have endorsed the "gist" of the report. But it turns out that the schisms on the task force run deeper than the leadership let on. EdWeek reported on Wednesday that Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), one of the nation's largest teachers' unions, and a task force member, has called the report "disrespectful." In a letter to the task force's leadership, she said its work "has focused almost exclusively on how teachers need to change rather than how the system and all its actors need to change."
On Wednesday, exactly a year after he won the White House and a day after the Democrats lost high-profile gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, Obama will be in Madison, Wisconsin to promote his education agenda. It’s a smart move. The media spent Tuesday speculating about whether the governors’ races were referendums on Obama’s presidency and whether he’s delivered on the change he promised a year ago.
The best thing about this video is the auto worker. Check out that Michigan accent.*
Congressman John Murtha passed away today. Below, you'll find a recent magazine feature that we ran on him--and the town he represented for 36 years.
It takes terrible luck or astonishing talent for a congressional Democrat to be endangered this year. Still, there are a half-dozen Democrats who really could lose their seats a week from tomorrow.
While this news may not excite the nation's loins the way the Wisconsin primary did, Obama just won the Democrats Abroad global primary--his 11th victory in a row. What exactly is the Democrats Abroad global primary? A good question, and one Adrianne Quinlan answered in this piece we ran on the website last week that's worth checking out if you haven't yet.
